QUERÉTARO

THE LITTLE MAN

The little man in mottled socks
walked the avenue and stepped on coffee.
Coffee is expensive here, blockhead!
Why don't you step a bit further.

ROBI

Sometimes, in the night, when everybody is
asleep, I cry. I know I'll go to hell.
Aunt Lisa won't go, and she's fatter than me.
Pillows prickle me.
I cannot sleep because I think too much.
When I'm not crying, I turn on the bulb.
Only if I make a rabbit with my hand
so that he goes on the wall, I get calm.
I have no friends as I fell from the steps
when I was three years old.
They say I was so scared that
I'm falling apart even now.
They call me Trashcan.
My dad works all day long.
My mom works at the Price Shopper.
Lisa cooks and beats me because she doesn't find a husband.
In school everybody is thin.
We have a school with a crumbling wall.
The fence is all rusty and if you
grab it you get brown hands.
I always wipe up my brown hands in the grass
so that the brown color doesn't get on my pants.
No one picks me up at school anymore.
When I grow up I'll be all alone.
Aunt Lisa is stingy like a skunk, she saves for her dowry,
she never gives on my plate enough food that I need.
I don't eat anything.
Stars must be very light.
Sparrows are not as light as I thought,
I weighed them.
For their size they're as heavy as me.
If I could fly I'd lose weight.
I know how the air rubs on your cheeks if the window
in the car is open.
Only my legs are normal.
Now I speak what I think.
Who does not speak what he thinks, falls apart.
Huge animals grow inside him and press
his belly with their backs.
Sometimes I think I'm a box where
there is
another Robi.
And that in that Robi there is a third Robi.
That each of us goes in all directions all alone.
Once I'll release both of them.
I'll buy a very thin rope and tie both of them on their
legs, so they'll pasture their way on their own.
I'll be without them all day, all night and if
my belly gets smaller, I will cut the rope
and they'll get lost in the space where they'll pasture.
They say: if someone truly wants to lose his weight
he should not eat for a week.
But if I'd leave them outside for a week, they
might freeze.
They might get lost.
It's not for sure I'd get thinner if they didn't exist.
Not for sure.
And it would look like I even don't have arms.
It's true.
They're both my arms and my brother, I have one
on both of my shoulders and it's 'cause that they're
inside my body is like having wings
of the butterfly in the chrysalis.
One day they'll go out.
That day my arms will dry up.
I'll throw my old two arms in hell,
I'll walk the steps and singe them.
I don't have other brothers, Aldo is blond.
It cannot be: one brother blond the other black.
I'd like to go to the mass alone by myself, not together.
Aldo should hit into the church door and
remain mashed there like a lump of snow.
They should all remain mashed there.
There shouldn't be any squeezing in the church,
you should be able to stare into God's eyes.
But now the people bring in the church the stench from
the kitchen.
It doesn't help if they dress well, it doesn't help,
I smell food.
I smell food at the elevation.
I smell food at the confession.
They don't allow me to touch Jesus.
Once they allowed people to kiss his
legs, but now they want to draw him as
a gym teacher and that's disgusting.
Aunt Lisa is the most disgusting, she's
the fattest, and that's why she doesn't find a husband.
I'll pull out the fence at the school.
And when my mom comes home she won't
have those dead eyes.
And my dad will read books to me.
The story about the grain.
Why am I the smallest and the most fat?
Why do also rabbits mate?
Couldn't God at least make that rabbits
were pure who are not guilty of anything?
Everything alive that grows up mates and the sinning
at the outskirts of deserts devours incessantly.
Bushes.
Grass.
It dries even those little pools known only to the
Arabs.
People mate and their eyes go out.
The soul flows away from a man already when young
like the wine from the bottle held by a drunkard
who cannot even find his mouth.
I'm fat because I'm withdrawing my soul.
I withdraw it for all three of us.
Robi, Robi, Robi, Trashcan, Lump.
It's better to go to hell with your soul than to go to
heaven if you have to get rid of everything.
I'll pull out that fence even if my pants
turn brown as shit.
Pillows prickle me.
They turned off my bulb.
They say I'm not sleeping if my bulb is turned on
but it's the other way around.
If the light is on I calm myself 'cause I can see my
rabbit.
If I see my rabbit I can pray for him.
I can pray for every part of his body,
for ears, for paws, for his grey belly, for his
eyes, for letting him have calm eyes.
If I pray like this for awhile and move my hand
very slowly, my hand becomes the rabbit.
Sometimes the rabbit is totally on the wall,
sometimes he's completely in my hand.
Pillows prickle me.
The window must be open but it should be
warm anyway.
They shouldn't close it, you could suffocate,
but the air should not go around too much either.
The air that goes around too much mates.
Everyone that mates loses his independence.
The air also dilutes like old sugar that
has lost its strength
The air should be always be fresh, but inside, in the soul,
the air should only go around in the soul.
I'll cut wounds into myself.
Let the rose grow from my wounds so my rabbit
has company.
And below the rose it should be such a carpet of clover,
like it is at the Bay of Ankaran.

QUERÉTARO

Who shrieks in the dew above the bank?
The red noche buena waits for a peacock.
Weary and sweet I tremble like a cypress.
It hurts.

Querétaro. Still the echoes from steps
among loud shrieks of birds at
sunset. White cloths on the tables and
vases of fruits. A biography of St. Paul,
dropped by us on the stony pavement.

THE BIRD DOVE

La syntaxe est une faculté de l'ame.
But as mine is a glutton, she carries her little
hands in the left palm and eats huns,
keefeellies and can with a combustible gas
bomb God, eats Vesna, stops above abysses, not
to mention the sprinkling knickers, on her head
she has her limb embittered, an annuity on
a couch and St. Francis’s heart, an amber on
all Christ’s ringlets, a cubical drudgery,
a forest, a grilled mosquito and Bach, a Venezuela
wreath, three fish on a heap, some of them
not, a cone for a czar’s attraction, a male screw
that sleep in Argentina or on the floor,
the eyes driven by oars, the silence breaking
a steam chests, with a murnygoonining
of dark powers and knees sprinkled with virgin
spirit’s shirts, a power by winch, stars above
horse radish, onion and garlic as Buddha’s
lumberjacks, a doe in a musket and Joe on a lake,
bang! silky Kornhauser, and a bystander inside
a Doric moo, one joyful bug, the yellow
spot of the capital on a drying hood and
a sea elephant, a body hair, absolutely adored
other natives don’t have it, an earthquake,
tear pearls that grew plant on all rock carpets
of all fourteen cathedrals, Ich — goes well
back or in the earth’s belly — a closet,
crock, crock on a bear and a lot of meat,
a yodel to kill the streetcar, a hard tiger like
tribe to soften and stop up the sore uncle,
a poor thing, a damask linen. Veni vidi vici,
spritzee please your coffee in my ear, the dance
danced by Atlas waiting for his satori in front
of the pub, a smell of stupids I like,
herds of deer, not an eyeball, gruelling
tunes, no naphthalene, in short, as I slap
God on his little peepers not ever noticing
the rolled up sleeves, my soul thrives, she is
a baroque compass that then collapses so you can
row in peace on the lake and say quietly:

I love you.

THE NAME OF THE WORLD

My name doesn't come as an angel,
but as a comet cutting the sky.
Flowers in the vase
in the night
are thrusted in
the middle of the day and
the udder becomes more
salty and more smarting to the calf.
Birds repeat their brainless behavior,
they frot the leaves of the tree and take
off in flocks in panic. Do they
fly toward heavens?
No.
Heaven is the cut at through stone.
Skin, the burning wood, it
has to burn till it's burned through,
the curtains hiding the nature of
God, are torn off. It
is possible to wipe the youngster's
nose if you stretch out and
want to. Why does this lady think
events pursue her and
becomes restless if the light starts
shining above time and space?
Breathe calmly.
Not a hair will be bent.
My name breathes,
as it rains,
as the rivers run,
like animals shifting from hip to hip
as people die or come to life.